Rift's dynamic content attempts to scale mob difficulty to the number of players present. However, even beyond the relatively simple events of the game's earliest zones, I'm finding that things are simply easier with more people.
I'm wondering if part of the problem is passive DPS healing. Mobs can and do get dramatically more health if they spawn in a crowded area, to account for the larger crowds beating on them. Though they do also get a damage bonus, there's an upper limit on this effect, because the health of any individual player in the group does NOT scale with the numbers present - if the mob does 20 times more damage when too many players show up, they'll start killing people in a single hit.
Meanwhile, Rift has several types of theoretically DPS characters who also generate passive healing as they attack. As more and more players show up, it seems like the raid gets more and more healing just because people have built this capability into their solo builds. As I've leveled through the zone events in Gloamwood and Scarlet Gorge, I'm noticing that even big AOE attacks don't do much to the raid's health meters because they're immediately topped off by a flurry of small green numbers.
In principle, it is good that zone bosses can take a while to kill - players who were on the other end of the zone to complete invasion objectives when the boss spawned should have time to reach the final showdown before the boss dies. I'm just saying that spending 10-15 minutes DPS'ing a boss who doesn't appear to be able to actually threaten any players can get old.
Catering to Subscribers and F2P in DDO
While all of this Rift stuff has been going on, DDO had its fifth birthday party. The shindig introduced a new pirate-themed world event, featuring an original quest in which players lead a party of comic NPC kobold miners in search of crystals and adventure. I didn't really feel like taking the time this weekend, so I logged in for long enough to redeem my pirate hat voucher and stick it in my bags for future upgrading.
(The sheer amount of work that went into this event makes its eventual return pretty much certain.)
Judging from the coverage on DDOCast and DDO Cocktail Hour, there are a few interesting things about this event.
Beyond this specific event, the content scaling issue impacts Turbine in each and every patch. Longtime subscribers generally want new content that scales for their high or max level characters. Newer players often have a need for more low to mid-level content (though really the low levels are pretty well covered at this point). One suggested solution has been to have content that is more flexible on level ranges, and now we finally have a quest that can scale from level 1 to level 25... but it can't stay in the game without breaking the business model. It's going to be interesting to see whether attempting to run two business models at once has painted Turbine into a corner on this issue.
(The sheer amount of work that went into this event makes its eventual return pretty much certain.)
Judging from the coverage on DDOCast and DDO Cocktail Hour, there are a few interesting things about this event.
- As Tipa observed, this is still a free to play game, and the event was accordingly designed to invite cash store purchases. I don't know if it was mandatory to pay to play, but it certainly sounds like the podcasters spent some Turbine Points on the festivities.
- Perhaps more troubling, the DDO store recently got cosmetic armor skins that could be applied over lackluster armor to improve its appearances. Predictably, people were underwhelmed by the appearances of the event armor.
- Unlike the Mabar event last fall, this event added a scaling quest (the Kobold mining event) that actually awards exp. For the most part, DDO does not hand out exp just for killing mobs indiscriminately, so this was a welcomed change.
Beyond this specific event, the content scaling issue impacts Turbine in each and every patch. Longtime subscribers generally want new content that scales for their high or max level characters. Newer players often have a need for more low to mid-level content (though really the low levels are pretty well covered at this point). One suggested solution has been to have content that is more flexible on level ranges, and now we finally have a quest that can scale from level 1 to level 25... but it can't stay in the game without breaking the business model. It's going to be interesting to see whether attempting to run two business models at once has painted Turbine into a corner on this issue.
Bowling With Ferrel And Friends
Yesterday, a group of Guardians from Byriel US made a run at the Ancient Wardstones of Scarlet Gorge. The team included Ferrel of Epic Slant and his guild, Iniquity (my home in Telara), along with Massively's Karen Bryan and her guild, Revelry and Honor. It was a great example of what I called MMO Bowling earlier this week, not knowing that I'd be along for such a ride just a day later.
My High Elf Cleric (Telhamat) is currently level 25, which is on the low end for quests in the zone, and I'd never set foot in the place before. This also meant that I did not have the teleport point, so I had to ride in from Gloamwood and blunder around a zone with higher level mobs and a fully greyed-out map, looking for the raid. This turned out to be good preparation for the actual event.
There are supposedly 9 wardstones in the zone, which will summon a raid boss once per day if the same faction controls all of them. We did not really know where most of these locations were. As a result, we had a raid team of about three dozen Guardians running amok back and forth across the zone, trying to wall jump our way up cliffs (Rift is much more permissive on this front than most MMO's I've played), and possibly inadvertently wiping out one or more Defiant quest hubs that we mistakenly believed were mobs guarding a wardstone. (I assume that is how most of us ended up flagged for PVP.)
Overall, we killed a couple mobs here and there, I stopped to loot the occasional harvesting node while our leaders tried to figure out wardstone locations on YouTube, and we probably gave the local Defiant population a decent scare. (Things would probably have gotten more hairy on a PVP server, but I'm guessing that you have to make more of an affirmative effort to make a nuisance of yourself before the other faction actually mounts significant resistance in a mid-level zone on a PVE server.) We never did find the final wardstone, and we're not sure if that's because we couldn't locate it or because it does not spawn if the boss has already been killed that day (there was no in-game indication either way on this point).
Despite this seeming lack of win, I had a good time and got to uncover the map of the zone amidst the good-natured mayhem. Judging from the reactions on vent, it sounded like everyone else had the same experience. Perhaps the zone event could have been designed more transparently, but it was a perfectly good activity for an evening with the guild.
MMO's As Bowling
Writing about Larisa's recent guild dilemma, Tobold asks:
MMO's As Bowling
At the risk of drawing an analogy about an era I largely did not participate in, I'd suggest that the old school MMO is kind of like going bowling. A modern MMO player might complain that bowling is a poorly designed game - when you go out with some of your buddies, you can expect to spend the majority of the evening either waiting for the machine to return your ball or waiting for the other players to bowl. The thing is, all that downtime becomes part of the point. The game becomes an activity that you do to provide an occasion to spend time chatting with friends.
Likewise, us newcomers look at the things that EQ1 vets say made the game harder and dismiss them as merely time-consuming, rather than difficult. Again, this comes from a different perspective - to a fan of the game, spending up to 40 minutes mostly AFK for boat travel in FFXI might merely be an opportunity to chat with your linkshell. (Or, they might find it as intolerable as I did, I didn't stick around long enough to find out.)
The Price of Entertainment
The conflict is that MMO's are shifting from an activity into more of a game, because that's where the money is. A game that's only fun if you're playing it in a group with your friends works if the majority of players and spending 3+ hours per night every night (or specific scheduled nights etc). It doesn't work if players show up for infrequent, sporadic hours and rarely have the opportunity to play with friends.
From allowing players to solo to the level cap, to implementing automated group finders for PVP and dungeons, to offering open groups and public quests to encourage players to drop in for non-instanced group content, studios have worked hard to make sure that you can play the game (and therefore choose to pay for the game) without having friends on the same schedule.
This change makes it feasible to spend tens of millions developing the modern MMO, but it also impacts just about every aspect of the game itself. Far too many of the MMO genre's basic tropes don't stand on their own merits if you're not spending the time joking about them with your friends.
All of which brings us back to Larisa's dilemma. In the new, more entertainment-driven model, players who might have spent their time hanging out in mid-level groups in a game like EQ1 are suddenly thrust into WoW's hardest tier of content. For WoW in particular, the need to get new players, friends and alts up to par quickly has created a bowling alley with multiple lanes per group and instantly returning bowling balls. For people who were enjoying the wait, this change is not a good thing.
"Is the purpose of raiding to play with your friends, whatever the content is you can reach with those friends? Or is the purpose of raiding to reach the top, regardless of how many friends you need to ditch on the way?"This dilemma goes beyond merely the highest levels of raiding difficulty. Because of their social roots, modern MMO's straddle a divide between providing an activity that is fun because of the company you keep and an entertainment medium that is expected to be entertaining in its own right.
MMO's As Bowling
At the risk of drawing an analogy about an era I largely did not participate in, I'd suggest that the old school MMO is kind of like going bowling. A modern MMO player might complain that bowling is a poorly designed game - when you go out with some of your buddies, you can expect to spend the majority of the evening either waiting for the machine to return your ball or waiting for the other players to bowl. The thing is, all that downtime becomes part of the point. The game becomes an activity that you do to provide an occasion to spend time chatting with friends.
Likewise, us newcomers look at the things that EQ1 vets say made the game harder and dismiss them as merely time-consuming, rather than difficult. Again, this comes from a different perspective - to a fan of the game, spending up to 40 minutes mostly AFK for boat travel in FFXI might merely be an opportunity to chat with your linkshell. (Or, they might find it as intolerable as I did, I didn't stick around long enough to find out.)
The Price of Entertainment
The conflict is that MMO's are shifting from an activity into more of a game, because that's where the money is. A game that's only fun if you're playing it in a group with your friends works if the majority of players and spending 3+ hours per night every night (or specific scheduled nights etc). It doesn't work if players show up for infrequent, sporadic hours and rarely have the opportunity to play with friends.
From allowing players to solo to the level cap, to implementing automated group finders for PVP and dungeons, to offering open groups and public quests to encourage players to drop in for non-instanced group content, studios have worked hard to make sure that you can play the game (and therefore choose to pay for the game) without having friends on the same schedule.
This change makes it feasible to spend tens of millions developing the modern MMO, but it also impacts just about every aspect of the game itself. Far too many of the MMO genre's basic tropes don't stand on their own merits if you're not spending the time joking about them with your friends.
All of which brings us back to Larisa's dilemma. In the new, more entertainment-driven model, players who might have spent their time hanging out in mid-level groups in a game like EQ1 are suddenly thrust into WoW's hardest tier of content. For WoW in particular, the need to get new players, friends and alts up to par quickly has created a bowling alley with multiple lanes per group and instantly returning bowling balls. For people who were enjoying the wait, this change is not a good thing.
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